UA fat, clumsy, grumpy primary school teacher has a student who is not subject to obedience. She faces him, “with the anger of someone who has not yet been a coward and sees a strong man with such curved shoulders”. What does the girl want? Get angry with him, respond to his upset? Try it or save it? With voracious kindness, or gentle voracity (the terms in Clarice Lispector are reversible), the girl does not know “which one of me” to choose, she does not yet have a formed character, although her personality is affirmative, bold. He tells us this years later, the professor has died, but he still doesn’t know exactly what happened at the time. Whether he wanted to love or punish him: “It irritated me that he forced a damn child to understand a man.” There is nothing evil here, or almost nothing, no reprehensible act, but there is a tension in which freedom is a freedom for confrontation and paradox: “I would give everything that was mine for nothing, but I wanted everything to be given to me for nothing.” He is neither a good nor a bad teacher, neither a good nor a bad man, or we don’t have enough elements to judge him. And a story of benefit and example, followed by the stories that students have to present in class, will lead to the final shock, alone and face-to-face. “I lacked the courage to disappoint him”, she confesses, but she really had to disappoint him, an experience that he, we assume, was not unfamiliar with: “Through me, the difficult one to love, he received, with great charity for himself, what we are made of. Did I understand all this? No. And I don’t know what I understood at the time.” Clarice frequently discussed the “abstract” dimension of her stories, but it is an abstract made up of concrete gestures, even if nebulous intentions. Is there genuine affection for the teacher, genuine opposition, or does she want him to teach what is not in the curriculum, to teach her how to be a person, while she teaches him? We don’t know, or we don’t know more than this conclusion: “And that’s how in the big school park I slowly began to learn to be loved, enduring the sacrifice of not deserving, just to soften the pain of those who don’t love.” This short story, with the misleading title “Sofia’s Disasters”, is not only a magnificent text, but an example of Lispector’s strangeness and fascination, which replaces action with will, dialogue with sensations, transforming memories that we have forgotten as adults into vivid events, into a tragic or glorious anamnesis, or both at once.